The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

opposite outcome. The United Nations’ World Food Program has seen enormous success since the release this past spring of “Food Force” (downloadable for free at http://www.food-force.com/ index.php/game/downloads/ ), an online game primarily targeted at children, in which players must fight hunger in conditions replicating mod- ern-day humanitarian crises. In a sign of the game’s popularity, Yahoo! had to step in as Web host when the original U.N. site was overwhelmed by users. A team at Carnegie Mellon University has produced “Peace- Maker” ( http://www.etc.cmu.edu/ projects/peacemaker/TheGame. htm ), a strategy game whose objec- tive is to resolve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. CMU designed it especially for Israeli, Palestinian and American youth in high school and college settings. The Serious Games Summit, an annual conference dedicated to advancing this new market, offers a guide to upcoming conferences and an abundance of downloadable infor- mation sessions from previous keynote speakers on their Web site ( http:// www.seriousgamessummit.com/ home.html# ). T hese efforts are evi- dence of a maturing video game industry whose constructive potential is just now being realized. — Daniel Zussman, Editorial Intern Hurricane Season 2005: A Global Warming Link? The destructive hurricane season of 2005 has added new urgency to the question of climate change, already contentious well before Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma struck the Gulf Coast and Florida within a two- month period this fall. Ross Gelbspan, who believes glob- al warming is a man-made phenome- non, is the author of Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis — And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (2004). Gelbspan asserts that Katrina’s “real name is global warming.” However, such claims from him and other alarmists were met with skepticism in some quarters. But despite the apparent lack of consensus, this year’s devastation has caused a growing number of people to grasp the seri- ousness of the debate. The Web offers an array of per- spectives on global warming, ranging from general background information to polemics on both sides. A good introduction is available at the Environmental Protection Agency’s information page ( http://yosemite. epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/ content/index.html ). T his site pre- sents a balanced view of the phenom- enon, laying out the problems it poses across many categories, and its likely causes. It also offers extensive data and research material for download, giving the public sufficient knowledge to form its own opinion on the matter. C Y B E R N O T E S u 14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 T hose who argued at the time that the acceptance of democracy in Iraq would be easy, and who drew on our experience with Japan and Germany, were wrong. They were dead wrong. — Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State, The Diplomat, Oct.-Nov. 2005.